Picked by PhDs

Saturday, 24 February 2018

In preparation for a trip to Sicily later this spring, I’ve
been reading some books about the island and by Sicilians. One of them is The Late Mattia Pascal¸ an early novel
by Luigi Pirandello. Today I came upon the following passage, which very
clearly explains why it is so difficult to throw things away. I’m surprised
that he thought and wrote this in 1904. Pirandello won the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1934.

“Every object is transformed within us according to the
images it evokes, the sensations that cluster around it. To be sure, an object
may please us for itself alone, for the pleasant feelings that a harmonious
sight inspires in us, but far more often the pleasure that an object affords us
does not derive from the object in itself. Our fantasy embellishes it,
surrounding it, making it resplendent with images dear to us. Then we no longer
see it for what it is, but animated by the images it arouses in us or by the
things we associate with it. In short, what we love about the object is what we
put in it of ourselves, the harmony established between it and us, the soul
that it acquires only through us, a soul composed of our memories.”

Tuesday, 6 February 2018

I very much
wanted to see the Jimmie Durham retrospective at the Whitney Museum. I’ve
known about Jimmie Durham as an American Indian artist for at least 30 years and his
relocation to Europe in the 1980s seemed a loss for the art world of the United
States. No one I know has heard of him. I’ve seen his work occasionally in
European museums, but it was a surprise that major museums in the United States
would mount a show. There has been some controversy about his
self-identification as American Indian, and that aspect of his work was not emphasized
in the exhibition until near the end. That made sense because his work address
many subjects and aspects of his identity.

Although I was eager to see the
exhibition, I expected to be disappointed because I know Durham makes extensive
use of found objects and thought I would see a lot of abstract constructions of
detritus. In fact, I found the exhibition riveting, fascinating, touching,
amusing, and both personal and universal. The first room captured me with a
video of Durham hacking away at a chunk of obsidian, making an abstract
sculpture from this very hard stone, used to make amazingly sharp tools in
ancient Mexico.

Slash and Burn, 2007
Collection of Mima and Cesar Reyes

Slash and Burn, detail

The first object I looked at was this
one, titled Slash and Burn, 2007, and
the label provides very helpful context for the work: “While in residence at
the Atelier Calder in the Loire Valley, Durham found a fallen beech tree in
Strasbourg, France. Inspired by its physical traces of history – it had
declarations of love carved into the bark as well as seven bullets from World
War II embedded in it – Durham cut the tree into several planks, which he
incorporated into a series of sculptures including this work. Fascinated by the
patterns and holes created by insects and fungus growth, he chose to accentuate
these natural phenomena by painting them with watercolor. As he has done in a
number of other works throughout his career, here Durham includes text that
directly addresses the viewer and describes his process of embellishing the
beech tree.” The label, the text on the work, and Durham’s additions to the
plank of wood all contribute to the depth of both personal (both his own and
others), natural, and national history the slab evokes. It was difficult to
move away from this very simple object.

Because we love Venice and
collect glass, the second object, Carnivalesque
Shark in Venice, 2015 also caught my attention, a glass shark with a
painted carnival mask, which was simply amusing.

The Dangers of Petrification, detail, 1998-2007

Many of the works are gatherings
of found objects with inscriptions that suggest political issues, artistic
media, or Durham’s personal issues, often all at once, so that they have both
broad and specific context. Sometimes the sculpture or panel composing several
found objects was uninteresting until one read Durham’s descriptions of the
items. For example, I found The Dangers of Petrification, 1998-2007, two vitrines of rocks, labeled as petrified states of
various unlikely items particularly amusing. The objects played with our
assumptions about what things look like, as well as the idea of scientific
collecting and categorizing. The rocks seemed possible as petrified everyday
foods, but it took a particular kind of vision and imagination on the part of
the artist to see them as petrified German black bread, chocolate cake, cheese,
or bacon.

MalincheStedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (SMAK), Ghent, Belgium

Malinche, detail

In another gallery was a
composite portrait labeled as La Malinche, the woman Cortez took up with in
Mexico, considered the ancestor of mixed race Mexicans, mestizos. First planning it as an image of Pocahontas, Durham revised it and added figure
representing Cortez. The face of La Malinche is remarkably expressive,
considering the simple materials and abstracted style used to create it. A detail of it illustrates Holland Cotter's positive NY Times review of the exhibition, which also includes illustrations of many more works in the exhibition.

Then there are the totem-like
constructions employing animal skulls and various found objects. Looking at my
photographs I was stunned by how completely different they are from each side,
as well as how powerfully expressive they are.

I Will Try to Explain, 1970-2012
Private Collection, courtesy of kurimanzutto, Mexico City

In several of the works, Durham’s
inscriptions make them almost literary and certainly biographical, always in an
unprepossessing mode. I Will Try to
Explain, 2007-2012, a rather simple collage, caught me with the sentence
involving the cat skin, but carried through with mention of friends, the
struggle to make good art, and the history of the farmer, the cat, the object
itself, and the artist. It’s almost like poetry.

For many of the works the
accompanying texts and the context provided by the labels add multiple
dimensions to the already sculptural forms. One example is the single skull,
remnant of a 1982 installation of
elaborated animal skulls, Manhattan Festival of the Dead, with texts urging the gallery visitor to purchase
them for $5 each because the work of dead artists goes up in value and the
artist is already approaching the life expectancy of an American Indian, and
dedicating the works to the members of the American Indian Movement who were
killed after the 1973 siege at Wounded Knee as well as to everyone in New York “killed
by subways, .38 slugs, needles or desparate [sic] acts, without any proper
ceremonies to help their passage and our passage.”

There is a particularly amusing self-portrait with identifying inscriptions, ,

from Six authentic things, 1989, Real Obsidian (Private Collection)

Une etude des etoils, 1995
Collection of Herve Lebrun

and A Study of Stars, 1995. The little inscription above says "The Cherokee stars have seven points" in French. I particularly liked the computer key and the starleaf gum leaf.

At this point I realized that I
had gone through the exhibition backwards.

Friday, 2 February 2018

In five days in New York we visited
eight museums, twenty-four exhibitions, four plays and the Santiago Calatrava
transit hub at the World Trade Center.. We had lovely meals at the Pergola
French Restaurant, The Blue Fin, and Sardi’s in the Theater District, Fig and
Olive near the Whitney, and the restaurants at the Met, the Guggenheim, and the
Neue Galerie, not to mention the friends who provided wonderful dinners for us.
We did not spend any time in the permanent collections of any of the museums,
due to lack of time, energy, and any compulsion to look again at art we have
seen many times before. We expect there will be time for that later.

With so many exhibitions, I can hardly have delved deeply into any of them, but I did have responses to them all. Four were the keystones of the trip. They were Wiener Werkstätte 1903 to 1932: The Luxury of Beauty at the Neue Galerie, Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer at the Metropolitan, Jimmie Durham: At the Center of the World at the Whitney, and Josef Albers in Mexico at the Guggenheim. I love the designs of the Vienna Workshops, especially Josef Hoffman and Koloman Moser. A vitrine of
brooches is spectacular, as well as the room full of earlier mostly silver
objects. Although some of the objects designed by Dagobert Peche are lovely, I thought he weakened the coherent image of the movement by adding more floral components
and making the objects larger and more colorful. As the workshop struggled to
stay afloat by designing for manufacture rather than individual artisanship,
the objects became more colorful and the designs seem looser. No photographs
are allowed, so I can only link to the Neue Galerie website for images. A
review in the New York Review of Books provides a few more images and
discussion of the economic and architectural aspects of the works.

Not surprisingly on a Saturday,
the Metropolitan was packed and it was almost impossible to see the
Michelangelo drawings, definitely impossible to have a leisurely viewing. It
made me wish the Met would charge full price for exhibitions, with pay-as-you-wish
for general admission. The narrative of the exhibition is coherent and brings
up a range of aspects of Michelangelo’s practice, for example drawings for and
by students, collaborative works with Sebastiano del Piombo (the subject of a
major exhibition at the London National Gallery last year, also with facsimiles
used as educational materials), finished drawings for and of the people
Michelangelo loved, drawings for paintings by Marcello Venusti, and portraits
of the artist. Among the sculptures on view I was particularly taken by the
small bronze by Michelangelo’s teacher Bertoldo di Giovanni, of Apollo playing
his violin and turning in space, figura
serpentinata before it was a thing. I don’t remember seeing drawings
showing student copies of Michelangelo examples before and found those enlightening
both for the objects themselves and for the sense they provided of the master
in teaching mode. The exhibition suggested the degree to which Michelangelo
collaborated with other artists, to some degree revising the idea of him as an
isolated genius.

The facsimile of the Sistine
Ceiling, one-quarter size, attracted considerable attention. I think more
people photographed that than the drawings Michelangelo made for it. It was
supposed to be helpful in locating the figures for which the drawings were
made, but the small photographs included in the labels were probably easier to
connect to the drawings. I suppose if you've never seen the actual ceiling, the facsimile is pretty impressive. The labels were helpful and clearer than most of those
at the Met, relatively free of jargon, at least for me, but studded with
adjectives – “bold, striking, ravishing, vigorous, impressive, forceful,
remarkable, finely rendered, powerful, beautifully elaborated, elegant, active”
for Michelangelo and “awkward, less subtle, wooly anatomy” for
not-Michelangelo. I tend to argue with adjectives in labels and they distract
me from experiencing the works of art on my own. I believe that people can
figure out if an object is vigorous or ravishing or beautiful without being
told.

While this was a most impressive
gathering of a great number of Michelangelo works, most of them terrific
examples of his drawing style, I wondered still about his working process. Did
he produce only this small number of drawings for the Sistine Ceiling or the
Medici Tombs? Of course not, and it would have been fascinating to see more
examples of how Michelangelo’s conception of figures evolved in the process of
designing these monuments, and others. This is not to disparage the exhibition,
which must have required near superhuman diplomacy and extraordinary funds to get
the important loans on view. It’s the kind of thing that only monumental
museums like the Met can mount.

A comparison between
Michelangelo’s unfinished bust of Brutus (1539-40) and a finished bust of
Julius Caesar (1512-14) by Andrea di Pietro di Marco Ferrucci calls the
Ferrucci “delicately ornate,” setting up a contrast with the far more muscular,
bulked up unfinished face of Brutus. Caesar is approximately life-size, while
Brutus is about double life size and on a much higher pedestal, accentuating
the curatorial position that the Ferrucci is an inferior work. I found the
Ferrucci extremely touching in its expression of thoughtful honesty, and the
figure seemed aristocratic as opposed to the rougher aspect of the Brutus. As
the label observes, Ferrucci’s mastery of marble carving served him, and
Michelangelo, well when he was “head of the workshop in San Lorenzo in 1524.” The
sculpture of Julius Caesar is a pretty wonderful object, beautifully executed
and not all that much more “delicately ornate” than Michelangelo works closer
to it in date, such as the St. Peter’s Pietá
and the Bruges Madonna.

Saturday, 7 October 2017

Once we had finished slogging through the national pavilions
and first sections of the Viva Arte Viva
at the Giardini and Viva Arte Viva at
the Arsenale, we still had some 23 national pavilions at the Arsenale and what
we could see of the national pavilions tucked away in palaces, apartments, and
other venues around Venice. We only got to ¼ of the 32 off-site pavilions. On the
way to the Arsenale from our hotel is a building that always houses one of
these. This year it was Cyprus and the subject was pigment. Unfortunately, my
images do not convey the subtlety of color in the nearly abstract canvases on
view there, works by Polys Peslikas (b. 1973 Limossol, Cyprus, lives in Berlin
and Nicosia).

Polys Peslikas

At the Arsenal, I was at first put off by the New Zealand offering of a very long panoramic animated history that started with images that reminded me of the movie “Moana,” which I had just watched on the airplane. Then as the Europeans arrived, it seemed likely to erupt in conflict, but it didn’t and we left well before the end, again our impatience with time-based art manifesting itself. In retrospect, it seemed a contemporary version of the historical painted panoramas that were popular in the 19th century in Europe and the United States, the history gradually emerging on a very long screen.

The Italian pavilion was completely different from its
previous two iterations, focusing on only three artists rather than the dozens
we’d seen there before, and titled Il Mondo Magico, (The Magic World). One installation created a sort of tunnel of translucent material,
with side passages that led to little rooms with cadaver-like sculptures on
tables. At the end of the tunnel was a workshop, where the figures were
supposedly made, and a wall with many figures hanging against it. It felt
rather creepy, something about death, degeneration, maybe crucifixion, since
some of the forms were posed as if taken from a cross. The artist’s statement,
by Roberto Cuoghi (b. Modena 1973) calls it a factory for turning out
devotional figures.

Roberto Cuoghi

Another space was a large substructure, which I didn’t
understand; it looked like some kind of warehouse, bare metal columns and wood.
At the end was a bleacher-like set of stairs we were encouraged to climb. It
was quite dark. From the top one looked back and saw that the substructure
supports a reflecting pool that provides a mirror image of the vaulted roof of
the building. The effect is something like an infinity pool and a bit
disconcerting and pretty cool, but reminded me of other similar water illusions
I’ve seen. My main memory is of my own unsteadiness going down the stairs,
which must be traversed at an angle, and of some concern that the heavy water
would break the substructure. The label explains that the artist, Giorgio
Andreotta Calo, intended the substructure to be read as a church and the upper
area to refer to something called the mundus
Cereris, a mythical pit near Rome that served as a door between the
underworld and heaven. The work is titled Sensa
titolo (La fine del mondo)

Giorgio Andreotta Calo, Sensa titolo (La fine del mondo)

Years ago, when the Chinese first had a pavilion in the
Arsenale, it was in a space filled with huge drums, a dark place with
relatively narrow passageways between the drums. Creating art for that space
was an interesting challenge. Now all but one of the drums (symbolic of the
past, I assume) are gone and the pavilion is light and spacious with white
walls. And the art seems more ordinary as a result. Several artists were
included and it was not very easy to distinguish who had done which objects.
The guide indicates that the pavilion combines folk crafts with contemporary
artists. There was an investigation by Wang Tianwen of the concept of shadow
puppets, including very intricately cut sculptural forms suspended from the
ceiling - one of these was also on view outside the gallery - plus shadow
puppet contraptions. Large videos, I think by Tang Nannan, of things happening
in the sea caught my attention. I never really figured out what they were about
but found the scale of the images memorable.

Wang Tianwen

Tang Nannan video, showing scale

We used to hunt for the Mexico pavilion when it was located
in a palace or church somewhere in Venice. For the past couple of Biennales,
Mexico has had a relatively small space in the Arsenale and its offerings have
been less intriguing to us. Perhaps the act of hunting for the pavilion
increased its previous interest. In this case Carlos Amorales had created his own
alphabet in order to tell a story of the lynching of an immigrant in Mexico. At
least that’s what the label says. I was unable to make anything of the letters,
so the label seemed to define the conceptual artwork.

Speaking of immigration, a video of Alec Baldwin and
Julianne Moore caught my attention for a surprisingly long time. Eventually I
ascertained that they were speaking the first-person experiences of various
migrants crossing the Mediterranean, and I was surprised that my response to
their reports of the experiences were more moving to me than the reports given
by the actual immigrants, which appeared on videos in the next room. It’s
mortifying but informative to realize how one responds to “the other,” as
opposed to one’s “own kind.” Titled “Love
Story,” by Candice Breitz, (b. Johannesburg, 1972), it was an extremely effective
work of political art, at the South Africa Pavilion, in the Arsenale.

Julianne Moore in "Love Story" by Candice Breitz

Not far from
Piazza San Marco were a small group of particularly effective spaces, in
various parts of a small palazzo. In the palazzo courtyard, the path to the
Mongolian Pavilion was lined with birds, cranes, actually, bronze sculptures cast
as if from rifles by Chimeddorj Shagdarjav (b. 1954). The flock, I Am a Bird, increases inside the pavilion, for a total of 60. Cranes represent happiness and eternal youth
in Asia, and the concept of the beautiful and graceful birds suggests an
alternative to guns. Another Mongolian sculptural project, Karma of Eating, by Munkkh Munkhbolor-Ganbold (b. 1983) is a kind of shamanistic gathering of the
skulls of a few of the millions of animals that died in exceptionally cold
winters and droughts in 2010, a disaster exacerbated by the overbreeding of goats
for the cashmere business. The other three projects also address environmental
degradation and exploitation.

Chimeddorj Shagdarjav, I Am a Bird

Munkkh Munkhbolor-Ganbold, Karma of Eating

Nearby, the Mauritius pavilion proclaimed a dialogue among
international artists, including work by Robert Rauschenberg, on the principle
that it recreated the Edenic unity of the prehistoric Gondwanaland, one of the
prehistoric supercontinents, which contained most of the southern hemisphere
land mass. Traces of the continent were recently found under Mauritius. The
Rauschenbergs were wonderful, better than much of the recent Rauschenberg
retrospective at the Tate and MOMA. Of the other artists, I was most struck by the
day-glo abstract utopian visions of SEO (b. Gwangju, Korea, 1977).

One of my very favorite pavilions was that of Andorra. Titled
Murmuri, and by the ceramicist Eve
Ariza, the room had black walls covered with hundreds of ceramic vessels
ranging in color from black through brown and cream. The attendant explained
that the vessels were the colors of human skin and that each of the vessels
makes a sound if you listen quietly, i.e. they murmur, as the title suggests.
Looking more closely, the bowls are crimped at the bottom, making a form that
suggests lips. If I had one pavilion to recommend in Venice, this would be it.

Sunday, 6 August 2017

Venice Biennale –
The National Pavilions in the Giardini

This year we did
not find much of great interest in the Giardini national pavilion exhibitions.
I missed the moving tree from last time’s French pavilion, the deconstructing
Russian pavilion after 1989, the Hans Haacke broken up floor many years ago in the
German pavilion, and definitely “Take Care of Yourself,” the Sophie Calle from
years ago in the French pavilion, which I have seen at least two more times and
which Tom and I still quip about in everyday conversations.

There are several
pleasures in going through the Giardini, though, despite the still very limited
dining opportunities and the exhaustion and heat. The pavilions themselves are worth
looking at as examples of 20th-century architecture. This year the
Venezuelan pavilion paid special attention to its architect, Carlo Scarpa(1906-1978), who designed it in 1954. Scarpa was mentioned very frequently this
year and his modernist architecture was much celebrated. Because of the focus,
I paid attention to some of the details of the Venezuelan pavilion, which looks
very simple and straightforward, but has varied materials and textures.

Goeffrey Farmer
took most of the Canadian Pavilion down in order to install an group of
fountains, the central one spouting like a geyser, art nouveau iridescent glazed
tiles.

and the Australian Pavilion has been demolished and rebuilt. The artist there, Tracy Moffett, exhibited fictive film
stills, perhaps inspired by Cindy Sherman, but without the artist’s presence
and more theatrical. Uruguay was closed
for some reason although there are descriptions of the facsimile of a cattle
chute Mario Sagradini had made for it. The American pavilion is neoclassical,
very Washington, D.C., lending itself to the images of a deteriorating, failing
structure that artists often like to give it, this year’s work by Mark Bradford
being no exception.

I’ve always loved the Hungarian pavilion, built in 1909, with
its art nouveau iridescent glazed tiles. And although the show itself didn't grab out attention, we appreciated the thought.

Only a few
exhibitions in pavilions captured our interest this year, and I was interested
in more of them than Tom. We both very much liked the Russian pavilion work by
Grisha Bruskin, dystopian but tongue in cheek, I thought. Generally I find
Bruskin’s work rather mannered, but in this installation it had an impact,
possibly because it seemed to warn against dictatorship, representing an
autocratic country. In one room huge projections flash over white sculptures
inscribed with book titles, concepts, aphorisms. Another is filled with strange
vessels and objects, all looking threatening.
Also in the Russian pavilion, Recycle Group did a project called
“Blocked Content,” in which figures or parts of figures emerge from white
angular blocks on the walls. Inspired by the ninth and worst circle of Hell in
Dante’s Divine Comedy (the circle of treason and betrayal), where sinners are
encased in ice, the artists encased human figures in these blocks for cyber
crimes – spam, retailing viruses, fake celebrities. In poetic justice, the
complete figures can be seen through an I-Phone app.

Yet another book
project was in the Nordic pavilion. One of the six artists exhibiting there, filmmaker
Mika Taanila (b. 1965 Finland) cut through the pages of cinema books to create
three dimensional versions of the book’s subjects.

I enjoyed
Phyllida Barlow’s crowded installation of the Great Britain pavilion. I only
learned about her at a recent Biennale, at the time when her decades-long sculptural
production was coming to attention, and I appreciated that after working for so
long in obscurity she was chosen to represent Britain this year. Her huge, very
rough sculptures were almost impossible to see, jammed into the rooms of the
pavilion, and crowding around the entranceway as well. There’s a kind of
abandon to them, and I got the sense that she was going to squeeze as much she
wanted in that space. Being close to the American pavilion, where Mark Bradford’s
introductory sculpture left little room for the viewer, it felt a little as if
the sculpture is in revolt against the viewer.

The French
pavilion was transformed into a very elaborately designed working recording
studio, all angled bare wood. People were working in it. I didn’t see how that
was visual art, except that the angled walls in blonde wood were lovely
architecture. Tom liked it.

At the Israel
pavilion a huge cloud form dominated the upper level, a concrete manifestation
of the cloud of vapor that results from a missile launch, by Gal Weinstein. On
the walls and floor of much of the building he installed panels covered with
steel wool made to represent mold he found in his studio, giving the modernist
building a mood of decay, some of it in the patterns of wallpaper. I’m not sure
if his intention was to suggest institutional, political or cultural decline,
but that was my sense of it.

I thought the
Venice pavilion, celebrating the most fabulously expensive luxury goods made in
Venice, and advertising for them, was vulgar, and I left it as quickly as I
could. Some years this pavilion has celebrated Venetian art and design in a
much less commercial fashion; I kept thinking they must be trying to parody the
excesses of wealth, but that’s not how it came over.

The German pavilion was highly regarded, but it was a performance and we did not want to take the time to wait in line for entrance, so we skipped it. I later found that its subject would have been disturbing, so I'm not sorry. We did look at the pair of Rottweilers caged in front of the building.

About Me

I'm an art historian with a PhD from New York University. For more than 20 years I was an art museum curator and director. More recently I have done some consulting, organized exhibitions, and written some criticism. My husband and I have a small apple farm and orchard in Baldwin City, Kansas, where the apples are "Picked by Ph.D.s."